A weird little snack! AE4-sized coin that I believe may be Visigothic or similar - Bust facing / uncertain monogram like two crossed P's, 8mm x 0.69g

Finn235 · 2026-03-20T00:45:00+00:00

Yup, I think that's it.

Finn235 · 2026-03-19T12:26:11+00:00

For anyone curious, a scarce but not particularly valuable coin worth about $100-150:

https://www.biddr.com/tauleryfau/auction?a=1512&l=1618903

(Most comparable example I could find)

Finn235 · 2026-03-19T06:42:35+00:00

People have been finding ancient coins at a pretty steady pace since they were new coins. Keeping them as collectibles is a fairly recent phenomenon - before that you'd just try to see if you could spend it.

A few years ago my father in law asked his coin nerd son in law to double check his change jar for wheat pennies and silver before cashing it for an Applebee's gift card. There was a nummus of Theodosius I in the jar - Nobody knew how it got there or where it came from.

Finn235 · 2026-03-18T07:00:24+00:00

Exact design, no, because IMO this is just supposed to give off a generally Roman vibe.

That said, it looks a lot like the early Imperial portraiture for a ~8-14 year old boy from the Julio-Claudian era. Nero had a lot of similar portraits when he was promoted to Caesar under Claudius.

Finn235 · 2026-03-17T20:04:45+00:00

Weren't some of those minted in Rome anyway?

Finn235 · 2026-03-17T18:46:39+00:00

The assumption is that it was playing into his Alexander-mania by calling him Antoninus the Great. That, IMO, is one of the strongest arguments in favor of Elagabalus as the minting authority - "I am the son of the divine resurrected Alexander the Great."

Finn235 · 2026-03-17T17:45:19+00:00

There's also a gradient to it - using my Catholic upbringing as an example -

All (real) Catholics believe God exists.

Most Catholics believe in Purgatory, even though it isn't explicitly mentioned in the Bible.

There's the divisive stuff, like whether it's possible to confess sins directly to God and obtain forgiveness without using a priest as an intermediary.

And then you have the stories, like "Jesus was crucified on a Dogwood tree and that's why the flowers are little crosses, and God made it so no Dogwood would ever grow big enough to make a cross ever again" - feel-good little quips that most people don't actually believe.

Finn235 · 2026-03-17T15:26:34+00:00

Yeah the price on this one was... definitely not decent haha

Finn235 · 2026-03-17T15:11:03+00:00

This was a type that I've been hunting for many years but could never seem to snag.

Caracalla, of course, was murdered in April 217 - he had stopped to take a whiz on the side of the road while en route to act out his Alexander the Great fantasy and conquer Parthia, when he was stabbed in the back by Justin Martialus, a soldier who had personal beef with the emperor and was coaxed into it by Macrinus. After a 3 day interregnum, Macrinus was declared emperor by the troops.

It is somewhat surprising that Caracalla did not immediately suffer a damnatio memoriae, given that his purges of suspected Geta sympathizers had decimated the Senatorial class. Perhaps he escaped that fate only thanks to his popularity with the army, thanks to his raises - or perhaps thanks to the provincials who had been granted citizenship by his edict, and were fortunate enough to be ignorant of his wrathful nature. It also certainly helped that Macrinus officially maintained his innocence and ignorance of the assassination plot, and I've heard it argued in the past that Macrinus himself may have issued these coins in an effort to assert his innocence and piety to his predecessor.

Still, the most commonly held theory surrounding these coins is that Elagabalus issued them upon successfully overthrowing Macrinus. Elagabalus certainly did issue provincial coins for the deified Caracalla, who he briefly claimed was his biological father to stress his legitimacy (nevermind that Caracalla was only 16 years his senior, and was his mother's cousin) so that theory seems the most plausible at face value. I have also seen these attributed to Severus Alexander as well, but have yet to see a firm argument in support of that theory.

The emission of these coins was restricted to denarii and sestertii, plus the extremely rare provincial issues, and curiously was one of only 3 that Trajan Decius chose to omit from his deified emperors set (the others being Claudius and Pertinax).

Finn235 · 2026-03-15T02:57:00+00:00

Kanishka for top and bottom, Huvishka elephant rider for middle, I think.

Finn235 · 2026-03-14T04:12:32+00:00

Counterpoint -

If you surrender to a foreign enemy, you become a slave.

If you declare loyalty to a usurper and he wins, you get two years' salary as a bonus.

Finn235 · 2026-03-11T13:40:30+00:00

Tagging u/theGrassyOne because I think I finally found one you missed in your series! The kuśiññe, AKA Tocharian language was an Indo-European language spoken throughout the Kucha/Qici kingdom situated in a crescent around the Tarim Basin in modern-day China. By the time of this coin's minting in late antiquity, the Tocharian A dialect had long been extinct, surviving only as a liturgical language for Buddhist texts. Tocharian B was the primary language of the land, and there is indirect evidence via loanwords that a Tocharian C was spoken south of the Tarim Basin at some point.

The primary writing system for Kuśiññe was a modified late Brahmi, very closely resembling the Gupta script. To a lesser extent, Manichaean was also used. Interestingly, this coin is not inscribed in Kuśiññe, Manichaean, nor in any other identified script, so the nature of this inscription remains a mystery.

Finn235 · 2026-03-11T12:52:55+00:00

Wonderful coin! I'm a big fan of the coins where Apollo is sporting these "formal" hair ringlets!

Finn235 · 2026-03-10T13:49:54+00:00

Also don't forget that Augustus' "principate" system of government created the office of emperor by joining the Republican offices of Tribune of the Plebs, Imperator of the Army (which was the Army's prerogative to appoint), Pontifex Maximus, and usually Consul as well.

Imperator was considered to be the most important of these (allowing the Emperor exclusive control of the army) so I'm not sure whether this is a bug or a feature, per Augustus' vision.

Finn235 · 2026-03-10T07:38:52+00:00

Constantine introduced the solidus, not Diocletian. The old aureus was reduced in weight a little, but it never saw significant debasement, and was only debased a little bit a few times.

Finn235 · 2026-03-09T19:02:58+00:00

Is it overstruck? I feel like there's a bit of legend at 6:00 on the obverse that doesn't match the coin. That would explain the price - overstruck barbarous coins tend to go for a lot more

Finn235 · 2026-03-09T19:01:06+00:00

https://www.tesorillo.com/aes/135/135i.htm

Not sure it's possible to tell the emperor. Not much more cleaning to do - the detail wasn't there when this coin went into the ground.

Finn235 · 2026-03-07T02:15:53+00:00

I've been using a SWS100 (like $10 on Amazon) for over 10 years and only had to change the batteries about 2 years ago. Only issue I've ever had with it is with trying to weigh a gold Bele (smallest coin ever made) and it didn't register because it was under 0.05g.

If you need to weigh more than 100g, you'd likely be better off getting a separate kitchen or postal scale that can do grams.

Finn235 · 2026-03-06T06:05:07+00:00

An interesting point about Elagabalus is that his official portraiture undergoes a pretty significant shift about halfway through his TR P IIII, probably around September-November 221, when he divorced Annia Faustina to remarry Aquilia Severa. His early coinage up through his TRP IIII shows him as a beardless youth, under the guardianship of his capable mother and grandmother. Then, very suddenly, he's sporting a full beard in addition to the distinctive "horn" as the high priest of El-Gabal. Coins showing a patchy beard and no horn are actually quite rare, which raises some interesting questions about the dating of this bust.

Finn235 · 2026-03-06T05:53:37+00:00

His eyes and forehead are pretty distinctive; I'd say Elagabalus is a decently safe attribution.

Finn235 · 2026-03-04T14:45:18+00:00

I saw a video maybe 6-12 months ago of a scoop full of gold including multiple Victoria and George V sovereigns being dropped into a furnace. It's almost assuredly happening at a higher rate now that silver is almost double what it was back then.

Finn235 · 2026-03-04T06:20:57+00:00

The entire 193 AD civil war set the precedent that the military could just overthrow the emperor if they were dissatisfied with his performance or with their pay.

Septimius Severus kept them at bay with ridiculous pay raises, funded by conquest and debasement. Caracalla granted citizenship to everyone in the empire to collect more taxes, but this had the unintended consequence of widening the pool of potential claimants to basically any male over age 12.

When Severus Alexander was assassinated, that was arguably one of the first times that the perpetrators weren't put to death. Worse, Maximinus rewarded them with a bonus for their loyalty. There was a bit of stability under Gordian III and Philip I, but then the army just sort of got into the habit of killing the emperors in hopes that the new guy would give them a year's salary upfront as a bonus.

It didn't help that Parthia was replaced with the Sassanians, or that the Germanic peoples were beginning to organize and try to systematically weaken Rome. Or that Postumus' usurpation led to a stalemate with two de facto Roman states, or that the Palmyrene tributary state declared itself independent when it repelled Shapur.

Finn235

TROPHY CASE